Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to), page 2

ABBA’s concert which is performed by avatars of the band has made £322.6M since it opened in May 2022. Kiss has announced plans to be the first US band to create a similar show.

As other artists see how much money there is to be made I wonder if we’ll see such shows from long dead artists (a permanent Michael Jackson hologram/avatar concert) or younger artists who simply want to multitask like Taylor Swift or Drake.

I can’t imagine this is a trend limited to boomers.

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/abbas-virtual-show-boosts-londons-economy-tune-225-million-2023-12-21/

If you’re ever wondering why it took me so long to reply to your email

I was wondering why I can’t follow people from Threads on Mastodon and found out it’s because the server I’m on has blocked interoperability with Threads.

Wow, so what are my options here? Nag the admins? Switch my account to a different server? What do I lose if I do that? Which one do I switch to? 🤔

https://www.threads.net/@thatadamguy/post/C02Bv7LPmET/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

It sounds like if I switch servers on Mastodon then I’ll lose my post history. Given that I expect I’ll just stop posting on Mastodon when Threads fediverse integration is done and instead will ask Mastodon users to follow my Threads account.

This actually helps consolidate my text-based social media accounts down to one.

Me to everyone who like pineapple on pizza

The EU has passed the AI Act — another set of rules that let them fine US big tech companies since there aren’t any European ones.

The law will require foundation models, including GPT & Gemini, to comply with transparency obligations before they are released to the public. These include respecting EU copyright law and providing a summary of training data. There also rules around preventing systemic risks.

Failure to comply results fines of €35M or 7% of global revenue
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4350934-europe-ai-rules-deal-reached/

The Marvels is ending its theatrical run as the lowest grossing movie in MCU history with $80M earned domestically and $197M. This is a shame since it’s actually a good movie and the MCU has delivered far worse, even just this year.

I will admit that even though I saw the movie I was not planning to see it. I only did because I had a few hours to kill in between games at my son’s basketball tournament in a different city.

I am fatigued by the MCU and I’m not alone.

https://variety.com/2023/film/box-office/the-marvels-box-office-lowest-grossing-mcu-movie-history-1235819808/amp/

The funny thing is that nothing’s changed now that we have the internet 😁

People on Twitter think I’ve disappeared but the quoted post literally says where to find me. 😁

This is like reading an analyst report that says water is wet and fire burns things. Wild that it's taken over a decade for mainstream analysts to say this out loud.

The Touch Bar is a great example of a feature that demoes well but isn’t actually useful in practice. It’s a characteristic of promotion driven development in big tech that companies foist flashy unusable software on users as part of department or senior leaders play to show their product team is innovative.

The Touch Bar primarily acted as the “fat finger bar” since I mostly hit it by accident. It could have been useful for entering emojis but that UX was too painful.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/31/23938841/apple-macbook-pro-touch-bar-discontinued-proof-of-concept

Elon Musk trying to figure out why Wikipedia needs so much money when the entire text can fit on your phone.

I don’t think you can build a real-time conversation platform like Twitter without trending topics.

Trending topics allow people to participate in a conversation about what is happening right now which includes entertainment events (concerts, NFL games, the Grammies, etc), movements (#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo) and breaking news (e.g. Hamas attacks in Israel).

The problem is once you amplify movements and breaking news, you get misinformation & culture wars. They’re like peanut butter & jelly.

Future generations are going to look at this generation’s laxity with genetic data and privacy in the sane way we look back at smoking, Jim Crow laws and fossil fuels.

You can’t change your genetic data like you can a password and once it gets out it not only affects you both your relatives and your offspring.

You carry a gene for a chronic disease that’s inherited? Now insurance companies know that about you, your kids and grandkids.

Unbelievable privacy self own.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/private-23andme-user-data-is-up-for-sale-after-online-scraping-spree/

AI has led to interest in new hardware form factors. But do we really need a pendant that records everything you say and hear then emails you a summary of your day?

Cards against DevOps

I just noticed a nice symmetry between Mastodon and Threads.

On Mastodon likes are pointless (they don’t improve a For You page or act as recommendations to followers) and on Threads reposts are pointless (they don’t show up in the Following feed nor is there a count of how often an item’s been reposted).

I love how each Twitter replacement copies a feature from Twitter that actually is incompatible with their own view of the product.

A broken clock fixed by taping a working clock over it is a metaphor for every codebase you’ll encounter in your professional career as a software developer.

This is a great example of being both absolutely correct and incredibly annoying.

I’ve never met a guy who called women “females” who didn’t say it like it was a slur.